Falling
by allthingsdecent
Summary: After the events of Out of the Chute, what if Cuddy was the one to fall apart, not House?


**A lot of my fics take place on the roof. I'm like some sort of crazy roof addict. In this case, the roof is justified, cause of the metaphors, yo. (Actually, more like anvils than metaphors, to be perfectly honest.) Anyway, I thought Scenes From a Clinic was super successful whereas this is more of a middle-of-the-pack ATD fic. But hey, I write em, I share em. Hope you enjoy. Oh and please, Cuddy fans, spare me your wrath. I swear, I love her, too. xo, atd**

House was standing on the hospital roof, staring off into the horizon, thinking about stuff, when he heard footsteps and an annoyingly familiar voice.

"Here you are!"

He turned, rolled his eyes.

"Jesus, Wilson. Do you have a tracking device on me?"

"No. But I know you come to the roof when you want to be alone."

"And yet you obviously don't know the definition of the word, 'alone.'"

Wilson smiled a bit.

"I'm worried about you," he admitted.

"What? You think I'm going to jump?"

"I don't know, House. A week ago you jumped off a hotel balcony into a swimming pool."

"That was an epic cannonball, _not_ a suicide attempt," House said.

Wilson folded his arms.

"First of all," House said. "Even if I wanted to jump, I don't think I could climb over the ledge with my leg. Which, now that I mention it, is the saddest sentence I've ever uttered." He gave an ironic smile, but Wilson was not amused. "Second of all, I don't want to kill myself. I'm fine. I had my cleanse and now I'm moving on with my life."

"Your _cleanse_?"

"Some may call it debauchery of unheard of proportions. I prefer to call it a cleanse. I needed to wipe Lisa Cuddy out of my system. I cleansed through . . . excess."

Wilson squinted at him and not just because it was sunny on the roof.

"And the vicodin?"

"Haven't taken a single pill in a week."

"_Really_?"

"You wanna frisk me?" House said, holding out his arms. "I'm clean."

Wilson looked at his friend's eyes. They were clear.

"Good for you."

"Yes, I'm just the poster child for serenity and clean living."

"And have you seen Cuddy?"

"We had one, shall we say, _incendiary_ conversation in the hall. Besides that, we've been avoiding each other. Which is hard, because you know how much I love hanging around the clinic."

"I'm a little worried about her, too," Wilson said.

"Don't be," House said. "Cuddy is fine. Actually, Cuddy is fuck-you-House fine."

"She's been through a lot," Wilson said, thoughtfully. "She thought she was going to die. Then she broke up with you."

"At least one of those two things was directly in her control," House said, bitterly.

"I'm just saying, all of this tumult must be a little _disorienting_ for her."

"Huh, if only she had a boyfriend to lean on," House said. "Wait! She _had_ a boyfriend to lean on and she drop-kicked him to the curb. You're up, Wilson. If you're so worried about Cuddy, you go mend her _allegedly_ aching heart."

"Something tells me I'm not what she needs."

"Well, I know for a fact that _I'm _not what she needs," House said.

#######

"Speak," House said into the phone.

"Dr. House? This is Martha Bridges, over at Meadowbrook Day School."

"I'm not giving you any money," House said, starting to hang up.

"Wait! I'm calling about one of our pre-schoolers—Rachel Cuddy?"

House gripped the phone a little tighter.

"What about Rachel?" he said anxiously. "Is she alright?"

"She's fine. But school let out 30 minutes ago and we've been waiting for Dr. Cuddy and she hasn't shown up. Which is highly unusual for her. We've tried her cell phone but it goes straight to voicemail. She has you listed as the 'in case of emergency' number."

"_Really_?"

"Yes, right ahead of Arlene Cuddy and Julia Cuddy."

For a brief, perverse second, House had a surge of pride. Then he snapped out of it.

"Well, Dr. Cuddy dumped my a—"

"Oh never mind!" Martha Bridges said, brightly. "I see her pulling up. Sorry to alarm you, Dr. House."

And she hung up.

House stared at the phone, scratched his head.

"Weird," he said out loud.

#####

About a week later, Cuddy gave her quarterly State of the Hospital talk to the department heads and key members of the staff.

House didn't want to go. But he didn't want to her to think he was so weak, so crushed, he couldn't even be in the same room with her. So he sat with Wilson in the back of the auditorium, as he always did, folding his arms defensively before she even began to speak.

Right away, he noticed that she wasn't herself. She kept losing her place in the speech, then making an awkward joke about it. At one point she put up the wrong screen in her Power Point presentation. She seemed scattered, disorganized. It was a stunning departure from her usually poised, impeccable self.

At the end of the talk, there was a Q&A. It all went fairly routinely until Dr. Neil Gibbons, the head of radiology, raised his hand.

"My staff wants to know if there will be raises this year?"

Cuddy looked down.

"As you know, it's been a bad year for hospitals all over the country. Princeton Plainsboro is no exception. I'd love to give you all raises—but I'm doing creative book-keeping as it is. I'm afraid it's just not going to be possible."

"I understand the board recently gave you a raise," Gibbons said, pointedly.

This kind of information could be accessed in the hospital's public financial records, although few staffers bothered to seek it out.

Cuddy's face turned a little red.

"That's true," she said, tersely. "It my actually first raise in five ye—"

"I just find it awfully convenient that the board was able to find some money in that bottom of that barrel you describe for you, but not for any of us."

"I . . . I. . . realize how that might seem, Neil. . ." Cuddy stammered.

House was looking at her incredulously. She was actually humoring this guy? The Cuddy he knew would've cut him off at the knees—told him that his very inquiry was disrespectful and sexist and if he had a problem with her salary he could take it up directly with the board.

"Like I said, I haven't had a raise in five years and I have a three-year-old daughter now."

"A lot of us have children," Gibbons said. "My son just got accepted at Dartmouth. My wife and I aren't sure we can afford to send him there. What am I supposed to tell my son?"

Cuddy rubbed the bridge of her nose.

"Like I said, I wish there was something I could do, but with our investors struggling and an increasing number of patients with no insurance coverage, the situation is just untenable."

"Except, apparently, for the Dean of Medicine," Gibbons said sarcastically.

And Cuddy just stared at him dumbly.

#####

Afterwards, House cornered Gibbons in the hallway.

"Why don't you lay off her?" he said. "She performs daily miracles to keep this hospital afloat and you know it."

Gibbons smirked a bit.

"Why are you defending her?" he said. "Everyone knows she finally came to her senses and dumped you."

"And why are _you_ smirking?" House said. "Everyone knows you can't satisfy with your wife. At least that's she what she told me last night. But maybe that was just the pillow talk."

"Cute House," Gibbons said. "But Dr. Cuddy is more than capable of fighting her own battles. She doesn't need her _ex_-boyfriend in hero mode."

"Well, I'd love to stay and chat, _Neil_," House said. "Oh no wait, that would suck." Then he pointed at him. "Just remember what I said."

And he limped away.

He wandered into Wilson's office, ostensibly to ask for money to buy Cheez-Its from the vending machine, but mostly to get more intel on Cuddy.

"What did I tell you about Cuddy?" Wilson said, grudgingly fishing into his pockets and pulling out the coins. "She's not herself, right?"

House shrugged.

"She seemed okay to me," he said.

"Really? That performance seemed _okay_ to you? She's coming apart at the seams."

"Have you talked to her?" House said. He kept his voice casual, like he was inquiring about the weather.

"We talked yesterday. She admitted that she hasn't been sleeping well. She's been having nightmares."

House frowned. When he and Cuddy were together, she slept like a baby, even after a stressful day at work. He used to marvel over it.

"What kind of nightmares?" he said.

"Nightmares where she's falling. Just falling and falling and no one is there to catch her. Sometimes she hears Rachel crying for her in the dreams."

"Weird," House said. He felt a chill go down his spine.

"What else?"

"Well, thanks to the lack of sleep, she's been dozing off at her desk. She was late to pick up Rachel from school last week. Rachel was apparently inconsolable."

"Huh," House said, shoving his hands in his pockets. "What else?"

"That's all she told me. But it's obvious that she's in bad shape."

"Guess she shouldn't have dumped me then," House said.

######

Julia Cuddy correctly surmised that her sister needed a night off, so she took Rachel back to her place.

There were a thousand things Cuddy could've—_should've_—been doing: Laundry, bills, even catching up on her season pass of Mad Men.

Instead, she went to Sullivan's, sat at the bar, and ordered a martini.

She'd been there for a little over an hour—she was now well into her third drink—when a handsome, if somewhat rough-around-the-edges, guy sat down next to her.

"Can anyone join this pity party?" he said, chuckling. "Or is strictly a party of one."

"This isn't a pity party," Cuddy countered. "I'm celebrating."

"Celebrating, huh?" the guy said, raising his eyebrows. He was a barfly, a regular, and already pretty drunk himself. "What are you celebrating?"

"I have a new lease on life," Cuddy slurred, unconvincingly.

"You do? Now why's that?"

"I thought I was dying of cancer," Cuddy said. "I thought I was going to die and leave my little girl an orphan. But I'm not." Then she raised her glass and shouted to the bar: "I'm going to _live_!"

"Well cheers to that," the guy said. "To not dying of cancer."

They clinked glasses. Introductions were made. His name was Ryan. He owned a gas station in Trenton.

"So what's a pretty lady like you doing drinking alone at a bar?" Ryan said.

"I don't have anyone to drink with."

He grinned at her.

"You do now."

"I had a boyfriend," Cuddy said, ignoring him. "But I broke up with him and now I'm all alone."

"Why'd you break up with him? Cause I know for sure he didn't cheat on you.

She assessed him through blurry eyes.

"How do you know that?"

"No man in his right mind would ever cheat on you," Ryan said, ogling her.

Cuddy laughed thickly.

"You're right. He didn't cheat on me. I just couldn't count on him. He bailed on me. Like, _a lot_."

"Like when you got sick?"

"Yeah. . .And other times, too."

"Then he's a damn fool."

"I agree," she said, staring glumly into her empty glass. "But I miss him. I miss the damn fool."

"You gonna try to get back together?" Ryan asked skeptically.

"Naaa," Cuddy said, adding ironically: "He recently fucked half the whores in New Jersey. Besides, he doesn't even like me anymore." She sighed. "What's done is done."

"I like you," Ryan said.

"Thank you," Cuddy said. "I like you, too."

He noticed her empty glass.

"Another round? I'm buyin'."

Cuddy wrinkled her nose.

"I probably shouldn't."

"Oh come on. I haven't even told you my life story yet," Ryan said.

So she shrugged and agreed to another drink.

####

Predictably, he wanted to go back to his place.

He wrapped his arms around her in a drunken bear hug and, both of them laughing, they staggered to the bar door.

"Let's be lonely together," he whispered in her ear.

A small part of her was tempted. To be close to another human being, to lose herself in the sensation of flesh on flesh. She could just disappear, be someone else, if only for one night.

But she knew that it was too soon. Maybe House could screw a bunch of faceless hookers. But she couldn't. Not even in her current, incoherent state. She still loved the bastard.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Oh well," Ryan said, disappointed, but not aggressively so. "Maybe some other time."

So she stumbled to her car, began rifling through her purse for her keys.

She had just gotten them out when she felt a strong hand on her arm.

_Oh shit, he wasn't going to turn out to be an asshole, was he?_

"Not so fast," a male voice said. But it wasn't Ryan.

She swung around accusingly.

"What the hell are you doing here?" she said.

"Watching you," House said.

"You . . ._followed_ me?"

"I was worried about you," House admitted. "And with good reason, apparently. You have the blood alcohol level of . . .well, _me_, three weeks ago."

"I'm fine," she said, yanking her arm away.

"You're obviously not fine."

"So I had a few drinks. Big deal."

"You forgot to pick Rachel up at school last week!"

She stared at him, in shock.

"How did you know that?"

"They called me. Apparently, you neglected to remove me from the Emergency Contact list."

"I'll do it first thing tomorrow," she said.

"Never mind that. You left your daughter standing on a sidewalk!"

"She wasn't alone. The teacher was with her the whole time. And she forgave me. You should try it some time!"

"You let Gibbons completely steamroll you at the staff meeting."

"He. . .caught me off guard."

"You got drunk at a bar and let some sleazy stranger grope you."

"Ryan is not sleazy. And you are one to talk—Mr. Member of the Whore-A-Day club."

House almost laughed. Instead he said: "This isn't about me, Cuddy. This is about you. You're a mess."

"Guess it takes one to know one," she said.

"Yes," he said seriously. "It does."

Cuddy looked down.

"You're confused," she said. "You're the one who falls apart. _You_. Not me."

"I know," House said, his voice gentling. "And you were always there to catch me."

"You're damn right I was," Cuddy said.

"Now let me catch you," House said.

"Too late," Cuddy said.

House swallowed.

"I know I fucked up. But I'm here for you now," he said. "Let me be here for you."

"And do what?" Cuddy said.

"Drive you home."

She slumped her shoulders—tired, defeated, unable to put up much resistance.

"Okay," she said.

So he led her to his car, made sure she fastened her seat belt, and drove her home.

By they time they got there, she was sound asleep.

He carried her inside, found her keys in her purse. Her head lolled onto his neck.

When they got to her bedroom, he gently lay her down on the bed. He tugged off her heels. Her eyes slit open.

"Do you want to sleep in your clothing or should I get one of your nightgowns?" House asked her, his heart pounding.

"Nightgown," she said groggily.

He gulped.

So he rooted through her drawer. Every nightgown in that drawer came with its own specific sexual memories. (Even the flannel ones, with footies. Those were her "I'm not in the mood" pajamas. The fun part was _getting_ her in the mood.) He found one of her average nightgowns (not too skimpy, not too long), and stood over her bed.

This was going to be a challenge.

He unbuttoned her blouse, slipped the nightgown over her head. Then he reached under the nightie and unhooked her bra. He was trying to be a gentleman, not to see (or feel) too much, but it was nearly impossible. His hand grazed the side of her breast as he removed her bra. And just the tiniest touch of the flesh of her breast shot straight between his legs. He tugged off her skirt, then pulled up the covers.

"Thank you," she said softly.

"You're welcome," he said.

And she kissed him—her mouth wet and hot and slightly sour from alcohol. Still, she tasted like sex to him.

He backed away.

"Come to bed," she demanded.

He looked at her longingly. He could make out the contours of her body—the curve of her hip, the slope of her ass—through the nightgown. And she was beginning to rub his pants leg, which was all she could touch on him without moving too much. Moving took more strength than she could muster.

His mild arousal had now turned into a full-on erection and he wanted nothing more than to scoop her up in his arms and reach between her thighs and caress her and be inside her.

_Oh God_.

Instead, he kissed her on the forehead.

"Go to sleep, Cuddy," he said.

"You're right," she said, yawning. "I am pretty sleepy."

#####

When she woke up, she had a pounding headache and thought it might've all been a dream.

Her first clue was the bottle of aspirin on the nightstand next to her bed with a full glass of water and a handwritten note from House: TAKE ME.

Also, she could swear she smelled coffee.

She put on her robe and slippers and padded into the kitchen. She was shocked by what she saw: House had totally cleaned a (full) sink of dishes, taken out the overflowing trash, he'd even wiped down the countertops.

And yes, he'd set the automatic timer on the coffee pot.

She poured herself a mug of coffee, tried to make sense of it all.

Then she looked out the window: He had somehow managed to retrieve her car from Sullivan's. It was parked in the driveway.

######

House was standing on the roof, reflecting on the events of last night, when he heard the heavy roof door swing open.

"What part of, 'I come up here to be _alone_' don't you understand, Wilson?" he growled.

"I'm sorry."

He turned, quickly.

"Cuddy," he said, in shock.

"I could go, if you want," she said, gesturing toward the door.

"No," he said, gently. "Stay."

She closed the door behind her, stood next to him near the ledge. Their bodies almost touched.

"How did you even know I was up here?" House asked.

"Wilson," she said.

There was a small pause.

"And how did _you_ get my car back to my house?" she asked.

"Wilson," House said.

And they both smiled.

"I wanted to. . . thank you for last night," Cuddy said.

"No need to thank me," House said.

"But I _want_ to thank you. I was. . .a mess. You said so yourself."

"A _hot_ mess," House said. "Emphasis on the word hot."

Cuddy gave a sad smile.

"I was. . .falling. And you caught me," she said.

"I'll always catch you," he said. Then he looked at his feet. "Well, except for that one really important time."

Cuddy studied the hazy view—parking lots, strip malls, generic skyscrapers. Princeton wasn't really a particularly attractive city.

"When I was a little girl," she started, "my dad used to drive us everywhere. And I would fall half-asleep in the back seat of the car. And I always felt so safe and loved, listening to the hum of the engine and him whistling along to the stupid oldies songs on the radio, knowing that my dad was driving and that he would never let anything bad happen to me."

She faced him. "That was how I felt last night. Safe and loved."

House blinked.

"I want to be that guy for you," he said.

"You are that guy," Cuddy said. "You've always been that guy. It just took me a little while to realize it."

She put her hands on his waist—rested them where his tee-shirt met the top of his jeans.

"I know it's probably too late," she said. "And probably too much to ask for. But I want you to take me back. I want you to be my—"

But before she could finish her sentence, her caught her mouth in a greedy, grateful kiss. He pulled her toward him and felt her body against his, never wanting to let go.

When they parted, she smiled at him.

"So I guess that's a yes?" she said, mirthfully.

"Yes," he said. "Always. Yes."

THE END


End file.
